Loveliness

March 08, 2010

(This is a detail from an album by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, photographer unknown, cheerfully bastardized by me)

The home renovations continue apace.

I am, of course, incapable of doing any of the hard handy work myself and instead spend my time fretting about the colour of tiles and so forth like the effete so-and-so that I am. It is an insidious, all-consuming disease.

The thing that bothers most a latent reflector like me is the number of snap decisions that have to be made on a daily basis. I am a person who shudders every time the mobile phone rings. Just as I am not a Festival person, nor am I phone person. Yes, it runs that deep. What is even worse is when, at the other end of the phone is a perfectly reasonable and helpful person demanding answers. Now.

The other day, the builder rang asking the one question I have been running away from for the last five years: What are you going to do about the front garden?

The front garden has always been My Great Folly. To be honest, it was never anything less than an Unmitigated Disaster. Amusingly, the front garden was notionally "better" than the back garden. I had already given the nod to razing the back garden. They found a deadly snake and a number of mice. Yes, it really was THAT house on the street. Children and frail old people probably cross the street to avoid walking past my house and its travesty of a garden.

Given that I am preparing the house for rental, the builder sensibly suggested getting rid of everything in the front garden and replacing it with nothing but a square of lawn. Clearly he saw the front garden for the bitter tragic joke it truly was. I, however, was slightly affronted and incapable of making a snap decision. I therefore asked for an evening to think it over.

I got off the phone, feeling a mixture of embarrassment and wistfulness. I knew that the the builder was right. Left to its own devices, that garden would eventually take over and strangle any new tenants in their sleep. And I would not feel great about that. But memories of my cluelessness in trying to establish that hot mess made me feel sad. It brought back memories of a dogged lonely independent streak mixed with a naive optimism. All those hours spent lugging over-full buckets of bath water about, cursing the sky like some latter day Jean de Florette. It is hard to admit that any five year project has been, in fact, a monumental flop. But who could argue with the stringy sad-looking bushes and shrubs pressing awkwardly against each other with obvious distaste, like passengers on a peak hour train in summer? All those tall things in front of short things. All those tortured twigs stuck in bone dry soil. Not to mention the weeds. And the 'hidden' river rocks. Oh, I threw the rule book out the window like the crazy fool I am. And it showed.

Strangely, though, I was hesitant to dismiss the front yard just like that. I always scoffed at cookie-cutter gardens. I scoffed at neat rows of iceberg roses or agapanthi, at box hedges that smelled like cat-wee. I wanted something wild, unpredictable and so very "me". On one hand, I thought that if I persevered, eventually there would be more of the successful "trial" and "less" of the cringe-inducing error. On the other hand, I was probably using the garden as an expression of an almighty sulk: So, I can't afford the beautifully landscaped Eden of my dreams? Well, then, I will just plant any old thing I feel like. Just you watch me!

I slept on it. I woke up. I rang the builder. I told him to get rid of the lot and lay down his square of lawn. His pound of flesh.

There was, however, one proviso: that he leave a metre of mulch around the edges. This means that The Madness can, and will, begin all over again. I smiled and told him I would fill it with rows of agapanthi. Like a good boy. But nothing could be further from my mind...

February 13, 2010

What could be more tedious than hearing about other people's dreams? Hearing about their home renovations. Has that ever deterred me? No. This, then, is my old kitchen. I know you all thought it was actually some dreadful serial killer's house, did you not?

It was alarming to encounter my kitchen in this state. The ceiling was gone. There were wires dangling and exposed rafters and lots of exposed brick. I would close my eyes to sleep only to have this image etched on my eyelids. I was so worked up about it all that the only thing I could do on the first night was to shovel cheese and crackers into my mouth like a machine. Swilled down with the occasional gin. My stomach was in knots. There was no turning back now. There is no turning back now.

Of course I catastrophised about the builders fleeing under cover of darkness and leaving it like this forever. An elaborate practical joke withmy house at the centre. In a state of utter decay. There are already vines attempting to open the back door. Spiders are ruling the roost. Yes, there is always one house on every street. One that lets down the team. And, currently, my house is it. Hoorah.

But now I am growing used to it. In fact, it is kind of comforting to know that houses, like humans, are little more than a bag o' bones. All weird and ugly underneath. But kind of lovely at the same time.

January 24, 2010

Why does the human race persist with wallpaper? It never ages well. It bespeaks denial and a lack of moral fortitude. It is an absolute bugger to remove.

I say all of this because Dear Patient M and I spent most of the day contorting on ladders, spatulas in hand, steaming up the kitchen in my old house to a level that made us turn pink and almost caused us to expire. All of this in an effort to rid my kitchen of its pesky, cursed, grubby, shoddily painted-over by me in a fit of pique, pseudo-Laura Ashley wallpaper.

I was going to write some meaningful sort of reflection on the person I was when I bought the house five years ago compared to the person I am now. I wanted to write about how nothing ever really seems to get finished in life. How things that are heavy become light, and vice versa. How the ground seems to be constantly shifting beneath my feet, in a good way. But that all started to sound a bit like a voiceover from some NoughtiesTV show (you know the type, "funny, yet sad", with lots of boring indie guitar music accompanying montages of characters clinking glasses or staring vacantly at the TV or watching their lover sleep)(Ugh).

No, instead, I was overcome by a righteous fury and felt capable of little more than this hyperbolic rant. My fingernails are too sore to accomplish much else. So I will simply shake the scurf-like flakes from my head and surmise as follows: There is something naive about people who put up wallpaper. Short-sighted. Dare I say, selfish. If you know such a person, sit them down and ask them to take a long hard look at themselves

January 09, 2010

Happy Belated New Years to you! Crank up the gramophone and dance about like loons!

1. Noughtiness

Where did those silly old Noughties go? Is it just my imagination or are decades just not what they used to be? My distaste for the 1990s has been expressed elsewhere on this blog. I do not believe that the Noughties were much of an improvement in the personality stakes. For all of its horrors (Cold War Angst, Stonewash denim, T'Pau's "China in your hand") at least the 1980s had pluck! Those 1980s had vim!

2. Most people live on a lonely island, lost in the middle of a foggy sea...not for much longer!

Onwards and upwards to more salubrious topics. The lovely image above is one of Dear Patient M's Holga photos, taken at the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC. Yes, my long-suffering paramour has recently started his own blog:

I highly recommend it - there is less sturm, less drang and many more pleasing images than you will find on this blog!

(Actually, I almost included a link to a Bahai Community blog instead of Dear Patient M's blog by mistake. That particular blog also featured less sturm, less drang than this blog. But, if I might respectfully add, the pictures were not much chop.)

3. Unresolved

New Year was quite a different experience for me this year. For starters, I sprang out of bed on New Year's Day without a hangover . It was a sunny and breezy day and it was hard to keep my surprising euphoria in check.

I have always slavishly made new year's resolutions in the past. I have never kept them for long. I have finally twigged that new year's resolutions are, for me at any rate, rubbish.

Instead of "resolutions", then, I cautiously venture to share some of the things I would like to achieve this year:

1. Learn the banjo. I want to pluck like mad.

2. I would like to write a story about a chain smoking amateur sleuth with sloping shoulders who gets about in a long pea-green coat, and makes her way from one mystery to another by train. The mysteries to be solved would all be rather second-rate. I think that story will be called "A bit of fun". The screwball comedy about a dowager and her lost jewels will just have to wait for the moment. I think that one will be called "A touch of elegance".

3. I would like to appear on the ABC's 'Collectors' with my ever-growing collection of World Record Club records. Before some upstart beats me to it.

December 27, 2009

I was delighted to run into some old acquaintances from art school at one of the Stupid Season's Christmas parties. It was one of those fortuitous conversations that lit up just before we planned to leave the party and made me reluctant to leave, despite having already said our goodbyes.

As we congregated in the late afternoon sunshine on the deck of a nicely renovated suburban house, we felt a bit like refugees from another, more fanciful time and place. We huddled there, heads together, wondering that our lives had taken such a conventional turn.

We initially swapped stories about how we struggled to make ends meet in those days - living off a sack of rice for months, being fed weeds from the garden by a medievalist housemate, washing clothes with dishwashing detergent in the bath and the like. We all nodded in sage agreement that the Young Folks these days would not necessarily know about such things.

We laughed about lecturers both sleazy and eccentric, living and dead. We touched on a student who was known in our circles as The Photography Slut (uncharacteristically, I kept that nickname to myself. I must be getting old and circumspect) and other glorious grifters who would attend artschool for a week each semester and somehow manage to pass their assessments. We chortled about a dreaded project wherein a bunch of pale, skinny and serious black-clad art students were coralled into a dance studio and, quite mortifyingly, forced to to participate in the worst type of interpretative dance. To add insult to injuries (both to our feeble bodies and to our pride), we then had to reinterpret our physical experience on the dancefloor as an art piece. In dowelling. It was, rather sinisterly, called "The Dowelling Project". The very mention of that title now can be known to induce fits and vomiting in survivors.

Once our horrified giggles subsided, our talk turned to the Printmaking department. The dear, genteel Printmaking department which was a safe haven for those of us who found post-modern theory too dense or ridiculous. One of the women mentioned that she was the only person in the artschool's history to have managed to break a lithogaphy stone. I informed her that one of my friends shared that dubious honour. The point was, the lecturers could not impress on us enough just how rare, expensive and precious those stones actually were. They apparently could only be found in one place in the world (Italy, if I recall correctly). In my mind, those lithography stones slid out of the side of a mountain, all pristine and ready to use. And then somehow, some time in the distant past, found their way to the wilds of South Australia. The Lecturers also reassured us that those stones were almost impossible to break. So knowing two people who have managed to break them is a bit like meeting, I don't know, Bonnie and Clyde or something. Such people are not to be trifled with.

I then recounted how I ran into the head of Printmaking a few years ago and was shocked to hear that all of those stones have since been sold off by the artschool. Yes, it was felt that there was no longer a need for those beautiful, smooth, ultra-impressionable, super-sensitive, rarest of stones. Apparently none of the Young Folks are foolhardy enough to attempt lithography these days. There is a part of me that does not blame them. It is a process with much scope for disaster. I always gritted my teeth, screwed my eyes shut and hurled myself at it, hoping for the best. It was nerve-wracking, to say the least, for a sensitive soul like mine. I was always at war with the medium.

And, what is more, the artschool itself has been moved to another location. That much-maligned 1970s rabbit warren with its pebbledashed surfaces, bleak industrial-style workshops and deliberately riot-proofed design has been razed to the ground. And since replaced with an estate of Tuscan-style McMansions. Even the relatively new buildings, those built during our time there in the early 1990s, have gone.

It is as if the place never existed. It is as if our experiences there were nothing more than a slightly wacky collective hallucination. But I could sense that I was not the only one in our little group on that nice suburban deck in the late afternoon sunshine who was so darn thankful that I had been a part of that particular brand of madness.

December 20, 2009

(Clip from Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows posted on youtube by sebaaastian13)

As Hank Williams once said, when the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' man. Here, then, is a little ramble through the last few months.

Dear Patient M and I roamed from coast to coast of the USA (via a brief sojourn in Auckland, New Zealand). We had a wonderful time. We took about 8000 photos.

We depended on the kindness of strangers (the dog walker who gave us a lift to Oak Park, the academics who showed us around SLO, the wise-cracking ex-Mandarin scholar who showed us the way to Marie's Crisis) and friends (Elizabeth and family, Oh Sasquatch - you know who you are)(How we heart Pittsburgh, its surrounds and its kind, funny, generous denizens who fed us, showed us the best of Frank Lloyd Wright and played us bossa nova!).

We were greeted with a hug, kiss and a glass of wine in the elegant streets of Ponsonby, Auckland, by the irrepressible Beth "McK" who seemed to embody everything we liked about New Zealand. We went up a big tower and I got shaky.

In San Francisco, we drank mai tais in the Fairmont's Tiki Lounge and cocktails at Top of the Mark. Then more mai tais in the Fairmont's Tiki Lounge. We were defeated by the Alameda market but were kids in a candy store regardless. We stumbled across Barbary Lane. We sniggered with affection at Coyt Tower and Coyt Liquors. We ate the best sandwich in the world from Molinari. Twice. We walked to Cliff House and the Legion of Honour, where they were exhibiting one of my heroes from adolescence, Max Klinger. We fancied ourselves in Vertigo and Tales of the City. We went across the Bridge twice and almost had our faces blown out of shape. We felt right at home in the grand folly that is the Palace of Fine Arts. We spent a peaceful late afternoon in a field at Yosemite. We bought books by the boxload, tipsy and late at night.

In Portland, we spared a thought for all those poor shanghaied sailors as we toured underground. We went mad for leafy trees. We were agape at the secondhand shops, surrounded by leafy trees. We lost ourselves in Powells Bookstore and bought more books by the boxload, sober, and in broad daylight. We even drank beer.

In Seattle, well, I was cranky. It would be unfair to Seattle to say much more. So we caught a boat with all of the blue rinsed retirees to Victoria, Canada, for the day. The Butschart Gardens was like stepping into one big kodachrome postcard from the 1950s. Which, let us face it, is a less than secret fantasy shared by both Dear Patient M and myself. Of course it is kitsch. But so are we.

Chicago was a veritable festival of art and architecture. The Chicago Art Institute was the best gallery I have visited. And Oak Park was like a free Frank Lloyd Wright theme park.

Pittsburgh was an absolute treat. Elizabeth and family made us feel so welcome. She took us to Fallingwater (the very sight of which moved both Dear Patient M and myself almost to tears) and Kentuck Knob. I finally had the chance to see the lovely and talented Lizzie's amazing go-go dancer prints, inspired by a clip on this very blog.

Brooklyn was brownstone heaven, especially Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. I dream in brownstone. There is another childhood fantasy I can cross off my list. I wanted to draw all those brownstones in minute detail. At Marie's Crisis in the West Village, we sang showtunes with the "freshfaced showkids fresh off the bus from the mid-west with a dream in their heart" as our impromptu guide put it. It left us happy but hoarse as we staggered about at 4am. We met a monsignor and his glamorous Argentinian mistress. We saw South Pacfic at the Lincoln Centre and Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, both of which made us swoon in different ways.

We were rained on in Miami and surrounded by writhing young folk flaunting their wares. We were entranced by the recently preserved Mi-mo strip, not to mention all of that Miami Vice pastel deco.

In Vegas, were went nuts in the artfully arranged Neon Graveyard, tried on glittery robes in the Liberace museum and were disoriented by all the fake bits of Europe that surrounded us at every turn. We found ourselves lured by the siren call and high camp of the all-singing, all dancing Fountains of Bellagio (especially when "they" performed "One" from A Chorus Line).

We lazed by the pool in Palm Springs, surrounded by springing palm trees, gazing up at the mist on the mountains. We felt exhilarated by Big Sur. We felt right at home in the grand folly that is Hearst Castle. Of course it is kitsch. But so are we.

We were mystifyingly upgraded to the Penthouse Suite of the Sunset Tower in LA. We rolled about in plush robes, drinking champagne on the balcony. We shovelled free toiletries into our bags. We felt like a pair of very lucky pretenders. These things do not happen to us. We saw Orlando Bloom. He did not recognise us.

And now we are home. And, after three years of living one street apart, Dear Patient M and I are cohabiting. Everything has been turned on its head in the best possible way. And I feel calm. And rested. And quite a different person to the one I was before I went away.

August 31, 2009

(Image of Leslie Caron and her "fun" friends from "Lili", taken from 'Gotta sing, gotta dance - A pictorial history of film musicals' by John Kobal)

Tomorrow, Dear Patient M and I are off to hit the States. Finally!

Needless to say, it is all extremely exciting! I have never been to the US before, and am naturally all aquiver. I am also extremely excited at the prospect of seven weeks away from the office. I will not be blogging much in that time as I suspect that I will not have anything to wail and gnash my teeth about, as is my usual custom of a Sunday evening. Barring unmitigated catastrophe (and believe me, potential catastrophes of every stripe have been running through my brain on a loop)(time to change the tape, I feel), we should be back in late October.

Until then, stay safe, stay nutty, dance and be gay!

And, in parting, here is something you will rarely see on this li'l blog:

:)

Yes. It is an emoticon. Yes. It is a happy emoticon. Yes. I am a very, very happy fella!

August 16, 2009

I have exhausted the neuroses from last week, and am letting myself enjoy a delicious sense of nervous anticipation. Lozenges disappear as last coughs are coughed, programmes are rustled and the orchestra warms itself up...

August 09, 2009

(Detail from World Record Club album 'Philharmonia Fireworks' designed by Guus Van der Heyde)

I know that someone famous said that there is nothing more boring than hearing about other people's dreams. That has, however, never has, and never will stop me. So, here goes: Last night I had a very annoying dream. It woke me up early in the morning, all full of fretfulness, my mind on a loop. I think it was a travel dream. Did I mention that I am going overseas soon? No? Only 22 days to go. I am beginning to bore myself talking about it. Other people must be stupefied (it has, after all, been about five years in the planning. And saving). That has, however, never has, and never will stop me.

Anyway, in this boring, annoying dream, I was watching a fireworks display. But all that happened was a bunch of little worm-like forms whizzed up into the sky, without actually exploding. When some of these worms finally did explode, they were always frustratingly at the periphery of my vision. Turn my head as I might, I could only catch a glimpse of the afterglow. I felt cheated.

I realised that I have been putting so much store in this one little 5 and 1/2 week holiday. It is what I do. I am a very good anticipator. I divide my life into 'befores' and 'afters'. The 'afters' are usually not as much fun as the 'befores'. So I have learned to cherish the 'befores'. The fact is, that plans do go awry. Awful, unfair things happen to people all the time. Why should I be immune?

I have been so wary of tempting fate in these last few weeks. I keep imagining absentmindedly driving into someone. I imagine being blindsided. I imagine that every phone call will bring unthinkable news. A trip to the hardware store today had me gripping the wheel with white knuckles. These neuroses are, of course, just a necessary form of self-protection. But I know that the real reason is that the closer I get to happiness, the more likely it is that all my dear old neuroses will rocket to the surface. I will be eternally grateful if they do not explode.